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May 31, 2007

Kevin Williamson (creator of Dawson's Creek) is back on the small screen and trust me, you need Television Without Pity to make sense of this one -- although they didn't name Liza "The Blonde Joey Potter of Weird Science." You can thank me for that!

The succinct History of Food: from emmer grain (17,000 BC) to deep-fried Coca-Cola (2006).

Lloyd Alexander died on May 17th. He was the author of many, many great
children’s books and is most famous for his Chronicles of Prydain, beginning
with The Book of Three. My mom read fantastic serials out loud to us
growing up: Little House (if you top it off with “on the Prairie” it tags you
as one of the uninitiated), Narnia, etc., but I think Lloyd Alexander made the
biggest impression on me. Somewhere half
way through the series I got way too old for bedtime reading, so I finished it
for my younger sister. Than I reread
them all one summer with my first great love boyfriend and reread them again
last year. They seemed only a little
dated – the spunky heroine Princess Eilowny has been outdone in terms of women’s
liberation by contemporary standards (not you Hermione!), although as a kid I
found her highly subversive; there weren’t many like her. Prydain is drawn heavily from Welsh legends
and the scale is appropriately epic, but Alexander’s strength is in driving
home the humanity and vulnerability of his characters. To write a story of flawed individuals navigating
the battle between good and evil is no small task, but to do it for children
with such nuance is nothing short of amazing. It’s hard to imagine a canon that
could produce Harry Potter or The Golden Compass without Lloyd Alexander. Sure, we’ll find out whether or not said Harry
Potter lives or dies this July, but you’ll have to wait until August to read
Alexander’s last novel The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio.

May 29, 2007

Identical twins separated at birth actually score more alike on personality and intelligence tests than identical twins raised together (roughly the same as the same person taking the test on separate occasions). Researchers assume this is because they feel no social pressure to differentiate.

Due to the widespread use of ultrasound, researchers now believe that the number of pregnancies that begin as twins is far greater than previously known. “The frequency of twin [embryos/fetuses] among abortions is three times higher than the frequency of twins at birth.” Many of the embryos simply vanish and are absorbed into the womb or in rarer instances into the body of the remaining twin. Extreme examples: five fetuses removed from the brain of an infant girl, a six-pound fetus discovered during the autopsy of an elderly man.

In rare instances, separate embryos merge together to create a single individual. This phenomenon only comes to light when blood donors are discovered to have two separate blood types (indicating they were merged fraternal twins). It’s probably more common than we think. You could be two.

Twin studies are clearly important indicators in the study
of the effects genes and environments play in shaping individual traits such as
intelligence, personality, happiness, and health, and in shaping larger social
conditions and outcomes. And it’s pretty
creepy to be a parent reading about study after study that point to the
ascendancy of genes (and weirdly relieving in some instances, particularly in light
of today’s occasionally holier than thou parenting culture). What’s creepier still is the desire to shape
the gene pool that seems to creep into the work of even contemporary behavioral
geneticists (did I make that up?), such as David Lykken, who, according to Wright,
believes that we should set up a licensing system for childbirth. Since illegitimate children are (on average)
10 IQ points below those born in wedlock, Lykken thinks we should prevent
unmarried children from having children. For their first offense they would be incarcerated in a maternity home
and then forced to give up the baby. For
their second offense they would be sterilized for up to five years. I’m thinking: NO. And yet, while the nurturing loving family (and
for the record, in my book, the shape that family takes should be up to you –
it’s the most profound decision you make) you create may not be able to prevent
the onset of depression, Wright reports that “happiness seems to be largely a
gift of the environment…the one thing a good family can do is make a child
happy.”

May 25, 2007

I've been loving Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution by Cornelia Butler so much I can barely stand it. It's perfectly organized: pictures, biography, essays. The biographical section is a different kind of paper so you can look at the whole big, thick, thing and land in more or less the right place. It's a great mix of artists and does it a good job of trying to represent the performance work that's so central (for me anyway) to the intersection of feminism and art. It's not just the usual suspects -- lots of South American artists I hadn't heard of, inspiring textile stuff, cool looking film. It made me feel all hungry. I want to own it. Love Catherine Lord's essay.

May 24, 2007

Regular Wordblur readers (and there are two or three of you out there!) should know that Wordblur ranks fourth in a Google search for "lipstick and chicken feces." I know this because a reader stumbled across the site after running just such a search. Hope you left satisfied! Now, how should we celebrate?

I was going to indicate that I was undecided about the Gawker empire's new Jezebel blog, whose exact mission I have yet to determine (tagline = Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing), but then they posted a link (via Salon) to this amazing dispatch on global feminism from the incomparable Joss Whedon. Now as a Buffy/Firefly fan I'm biased (and also well aware of some of Whedon's own limitations re: gender equity), but read it and see if you think it wasn't the most moving call to arms you've encountered in some time. More like this please.